Hainan ambitions win central backing
CHINA is backing Hainan’s plan to turn the whole island into a pilot free trade zone.
President Xi Jinping made the announcement when delivering a speech at a gathering to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of Hainan Province and the Hainan Special Economic Zone on Friday.
Hainan is also gradually exploring and steadily promoting the establishment of a free trade port with Chinese characteristics.
Hainan will be China’s largest free trade zone enjoying increased opening-up policies and will be the country’s first free trade port since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
“As an isolated island, Hainan can only develop and catch up with the pace of the country’s growth with the world’s highest degree of opening-up,” said Chi Fulin, head of the Hainan-based China Institute for Reform and Development. Chi, 67, a former official who left Beijing for Hainan in October 1987, was among 100,000 employees across the country to find opportunity and fortune in the burgeoning province in the late 1980s. Once remote and underdeveloped, Hainan has become one of China’s most open and dynamic regions and a top tourist destination.
Xi’s speech highlighted Hainan’s special advantages — including its status as China’s biggest special economic zone, its geographic location and the best ecological environment in the country, as reasons to make it a test ground for reform and opening-up.
Xi urged the province to give priority to opening-up and speed up the establishment of new institutions of an open economy.
Exchanges in international energy, shipping, commodities and carbon trading will be established in Hainan. The island will also focus on developing modern service industries such as tourism, the Internet, health care, finance, and hosting conferences and exhibitions.
Qian Jiannong, senior vice president of Fosun International Ltd, investor of the first Atlantis resort in China, has high hopes of Hainan’s future.
“Hainan is the only tropical island province in China. The era of sightseeing is past and the era of leisure and resort is coming,” said Qian. The Atlantis resort, with an investment of 11 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion), is expected to open by the end of this month in Sanya.
As the smallest province but biggest special economic zone, Hainan is an ideal test ground of China’s reform and opening-up.
In the early 1990s, it boasted China’s first listed private company, and Yangpu Economic Development Zone, the first development zone approved for lease to foreign investors by the Chinese government.
It is also the only province in the country without toll stations on its highways, due to a fee-totax reform in 1994.
Since 2001, the town of Boao has become the permanent site of the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia, the first permanent site for an international conference in China. In 2005, Hainan was the first province to remove the centuries-old agricultural tax.
The national strategy of building Hainan into an international tourist destination has put it on the fast track since 2010, attracting investment and infrastructure, such as high-speed railways, hotels, commercial real estate and tourism facilities.
“I believe Hainan will be a highly international and modernized island in another 30 years,” Chi said.